Coventry (16 page)

The village on Innismor where Maeve lives is little more than a scattering of houses arranged haphazardly around the small harbour. The houses seem to have been lifted there by the sea, their white walls set like bleached bones among the rocks.

Maeve stops on the road to catch her breath, turns and sees the houses flashing white behind her. Beyond them, she can see the mail boat lurching away from the jetty, heading back across the Atlantic to Galway.

Maeve had expected Tom to be on the boat. That is why she had gone down to the harbour, to meet her husband. But Tom probably got talking with someone, or tried to squeeze in one more errand before the boat left, and arrived on the Galway dock just in time to watch the battered black hull of the mail boat pushing out to sea.

It is not the first time this has happened, and because it has happened so many times before, Maeve isn’t overly surprised or worried. Tom is dependable in his vagrancy. He will show up tomorrow, or the day after, cheerfully apologetic, bounding spryly up from the beach with stories and his canvas bag filled with food and some small present for Maeve from his time in the city.

Maeve had not expected to marry and be happy. She had not expected to meet someone late in life, someone who liked to move around as much as she did. But Tom is even more of a nomad. He is originally from America, but has spent most of his life elsewhere. He has lived throughout South America and Europe and has come to the Aran Islands because, like Maeve, he can live cheaply there, and he loves the way the light shovels in off the Atlantic.

Tom is a painter. He has fashioned a studio out of the small barn behind their cottage. He wakes late and spends much of his day in the studio. In the evenings he and Maeve read, or walk to the one pub on the island to have a pint. He never minds company when he works, and Maeve likes to go into the studio to watch him paint. He has an energy when he works that she finds intoxicating. In some ways he reminds her of Jeremy, of the concentration Jeremy used to have when he set himself a task.

Where once Maeve would have found the resemblance painful, now there is some comfort in it.

Maeve begins to walk up the road again. Slowly the houses fall away and she is walking with green fields on either side of her. Each field is bordered by a wall made of the stones that had been cleared from the field. The walls have no gates. If a farmer wants to shift his cows and sheep to another field, he simply removes some of the stones from a section of wall, replacing them when the animals are safely away in the next field.

This is another reason why Maeve likes living on the Aran Islands. Everything here is as it always was. There is no electricity, no motor cars. Many of the people on the islands still speak Gaelic. The lack of change is reassuring, though Maeve wonders if she will be able to survive the harshness of the conditions into her very old age. But Tom is already talking about moving them to Spain; though Maeve loves the starkness of Innismor, the thought of the Spanish sun warming her bones is tempting.

The road is steep, the centre of the island being much higher than the sea that twists all around it. Maeve has to pause frequently in her climb. She hasn’t really minded becoming old, but it still surprises her that she can’t move as fluently as she once did.

Her heart is whirring fast inside her chest.

This is probably far enough.

She settles down with her back against a wall and takes the bundle of mail from her pocket. The postcard from Harriet slips easily out of the pile.

It is a picture of the new cathedral. It looks nothing like the old one—all sheer and modern—but Maeve’s hands start shaking at the sight of it. She takes a deep breath. The stones from the wall are warm against her back, warm through the thick wool of her jumper.

This is what she and Harriet do—pass the memory of that night in November 1940 back and forth between them. Harriet will send Maeve a poem. Maeve will send Harriet a drawing. Where once Maeve drew the world around her to navigate it, now she draws only the images from the night when Coventry fell, and when Jeremy died. Drawing something used to be a way for her to record what was being lost, a way to slow the moment down long enough to get a good look at what was moving just out of reach. Now it is purely a way to hold on to what she has lost.

Every act is an act of mourning, thinks Maeve. Every moment is about leaving the previous moment behind.

She has drawn the cramped, dark pub cellar where she sheltered at the beginning of the bombing. She has drawn Jeremy’s soldiers in frozen march across his bedroom window ledge. She has drawn Harriet’s hands cradling her own when they were atop that pile of rubble where they had heard the woman’s voice calling out to be saved. And she has drawn the metal rib cage of the Anderson shelter with the ragged hole torn through its side.

But even though this exchange of memory is a way for Harriet and Maeve to keep something of Jeremy alive, it is always a shock to remember. It is always a shock to get a card or letter from Harriet, and to have to open herself, again, to the horrors of that night.

For a while, after the night of the bombing, Maeve believed that Harriet had simply been a guide through the ruined city to her son. But the longer her association with her continues, the more Maeve has come to realize that something else must have happened the night Coventry fell. Harriet has never said, and Maeve can’t bring herself to ask, but she assumes now that Harriet and Jeremy were briefly lovers. Why else would Harriet keep this vigil with her? Once Maeve might have minded this, but now she is only grateful that her child was loved during his last night on earth.

The sun is making Maeve’s eyes water. She runs her thumb along the straight edges of the postcard. Down one side, along another, as if they were streets she was walking.

The night still makes no sense, no matter how hard Maeve looks at it, no matter what pictures she is able to pull from the wreckage. But thank god for Harriet Marsh, she thinks. Thank god that in the loneliest of griefs, she is not alone.

She turns the card over and begins to read the words Harriet has sent to her.